Todd Holmdahl: Xbox 360 Interview

When Microsoft promotes all things Xbox, they usually drag out one of three VPs: Peter Moore, J Allard, or Robbie Bach. But central to the Xbox cause is a fourth VP, Todd Holmdahl. He’s responsible for all the hardware development, hardware and semiconductor teams, manufacturing, and test teams. About 250 people, overall, work under him. We were fortunate enough to get a chunk of his busy schedule to sit down and talk about the Xbox 360.

Todd Holmdahl: Why don’t I just walk you quickly through what we’re trying to do One of the things we talked about last night is: Xbox 360 is all about “the experience.” We want to put you the gamer at the center of the whole experience. It’s your games, it’s your friends, it’s your digital entertainment lifestyle. In order to do that, we have to not only take a great piece of hardware, but it takes a great platform. It’s made up of great hardware, great software, and services. (Holmdahl is drawing a diagram of how these all relate on a piece of paper ed.) We started architecting this about two and a half years ago, and what we wanted to do is to make sure that we had a great piece of software that used every transistor on the design. When we were thinking about the hardware design, we were also thinking about the software. And we wanted to make sure we had great services. We wanted to make sure every game was easy to develop so that you would have online connectivity. We build that in from the ground up. Really, what we think it allows the game developer to do is realize their vision, developing the games they want to develop for the high-definition era.

When you drop down to the hardware, one of the things we learned from the Xbox 1 is we wanted to really control our destiny with respect to the performance of the box. We architected the CPU, the GPU, and the I/O or south bridge, and the TV Encoder. We worked with great partners like IBM and ATI. We had over 1,000 people working on the silicon design at any one time. A lot of great collaboration. We focused on developing something that was very powerful, very elegant. We wanted something that was balanced, and that you were using all the horsepower that the box could put out there. You didn’t have any bottlenecks or anything that was starved. If the GPU needed data, the CPU would always be able to send it data. And we wanted it to be flexible, what we like to say is future proof. We have one teraflop of performance, and you’re going to get all those flops. It’s easy to program, it’s easy to access. The CPU has three cores that run at 3.2GHz, and each core has two threads. So what you can do, on any one of those threads you could be doing A.I. work, collision detection, physics, audio It allows the game developer to figure out how they want to develop their game, how they want to realize their vision. And two years from now, maybe they come up with very different algorithms, and they have the horsepower to utilize that when you have this many threads and it’s this powerful.

ExtremeTech: Speaking to that, developers express a lot of concern about developing richly multithreaded games. It’s something they’re going to have to do for you, for Sony, and for future PCs. Game development now is very serial. What work are you doing on the tools side to make this easier for developers?

TH: The XNA framework, if you’re familiar with that, is a framework we’re developing across both Xbox and Windows. The whole intent of it is to make game development more straightforward, more efficient, more effective. We have an Advanced Technology Group, and it’s their job to go out there and give guidance to developers about how to make the best of the CPU. Microsoft has a long history of working with multiple-threaded devices, and we’re taking a lot of our learnings form that and applying that to the games business. You’re right: This is something new for developers. I think we’re in the best position to roll this out to game developers and make it the most efficient and most effective for them. Continued…

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